Grooming itself, a laid
back sea otter seems
the picture of ease. But
looks mislead. Lacking
blubber, this seafaring
mammal must constantly
preen its plusher-than
mink fur to saturate
it with air bubbles
insulation against cold
Pacific waters.
JEFFFOOTT
ASY HAS A COUGH.
"He came in wheezing," says Julie Hymer, who
looks after orphaned California sea otter pups brought
to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
I am squinting through a peephole into Casy's nurs
ery, where he is supine on his water bed. Only five
weeks old, he looks like a furry brown mitten. Glee
fully he juggles an abalone shell with his hind flippers
and forepaws.
"His attitude is good," Hymer says. "But we could
lose him."
I have come to Monterey to learn how California sea
otters are doing in their comeback from near extinction. As many as
20,000 sea otters once dived for abalones and urchins in the Pacific
off California. But Russian fur hunters, followed by Americans and
the English, decimated them. By the early 1900s only a few Califor
nia sea otters remained. Since then-legally protected-the popula
tion has grown. But the slowness of the otters' return worries
biologists. Today fewer than 2,400 wild sea otters swim in Califor
nia's kelp forests. Casy embodies their predicament: He can charm
your socks off, but he is threatened.
With so few otters, any unlucky day a major oil spill could kill
most of them. Meanwhile, fishermen view otters as competitors and
lobby to limit their range. But the otters have more friends than foes.
At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, for instance, humans are acting as
surrogate mothers for orphaned otter pups, teaching them to survive
in the Pacific. The goal is to return orphaned pups to the wild.
These oceangoing cousins of river otters once flourished from
Oregon to Baja California. Now they inhabit only a 250-mile stretch
of California's central coast. To the north live their two close rela
tives, the Russian and Alaska sea otters. The three subspecies are
separated mainly by nuances of skull shape. Also, the northern sea
otters sometimes catch fish, while their California cousins eat only
crabs, abalones, urchins, and other invertebrates. All three races are
about the size of basset hounds, with comical bushy mustaches.
Sea otters are the most recent land mammals to return to the
ocean, and they still look like a prototype, with floppy flippers in
back and forelegs resembling a human baby's arms. Their dark
brown fur often pales to California blond on their heads. Their live
liness is exhilarating. And they look-how else to say it?-sweet,
like aquatic teddy bears. To see them is to be smitten. I was.
Even a hard-bitten biologist once told me, "Otters have a high
cuddle factor." And so it seems to me that sea otters are a gauge of
our performance as earth's self-appointed stewards. If we let these
engaging animals disappear, alarms should go off, sirens wail.
Coexistence with humans is the issue. And it bodes well that Cali
fornia sea otters are flourishing in the heart of their range, the Mon
terey Peninsula, because it is chockablock with people. Monterey
is a contrapuntal arrangement of mountains and the green Pacific:
cypresses, surf, seals, and seaside glass-walled mansions, with
Freelance writer RICHARD WOLKOMIR's interest in endangered mammal
species inspired him and his wife, Joyce, to co-author Junkyard Bandicoots
& Other Tales of the World's Endangered Species. GEOGRAPHIC contract
photographer SISSE BRIMBERG most recently illustrated "When the Greeks
Went West" (November 1994).
NationalGeographic,June 1995